“A lonely man attends a seance, seeking to communicate with the spirit of his deceased wife. A woman is anxious about the future, and her friend points her to the horoscope column in the daily paper. Schoolgirls join a witches’ coven and practice hexes on classmates! A study of the occult in light of God’s Word. This book exposes the power of demonic spirits and points the way to deliverance.”

Publisher: Tyndale
Paperback: 336 pages

Focus on the Family’s Bob Larson starts off with some tried-and-true Tipper Gore material: Frank Zappa’s congressional “Porn Wars” and the Giger-poster-as-kiddie-porn trial of Jello Biafra, then he gay-bashes the New York Dolls (?), Elton John and the general androgyny implied in rock. (Gee, there’s a male singer named Alice Cooper who wears makeup!) Larson then proceeds for most of this unintentionally comedic book with the usual who’s who of rock stars and how each is Satanic, expressing a ravenous, unrequited lust for Pat Benatar. He really wants to hit her with his best shot, and so we all must suffer. Let’s see, kids use rock music to rebel, but you can deprogram them after reading this book and they will thank you while burning their record collections. “There may be more to Led Zeppelin’s success than meets the eye,” but the author consoles us with the news that more kids than ever are boogieing to teen rock at Christian discos these days. But won’t self-righteous hacks like Larson ever realize that Black Sabbath has always been a Christian band? MS

Publisher: Tyndale
Paperback: 192 pages

A “cult hero” of sorts himself, Larson is probably best known currently for his internationally broadcast radio show Talk Back, a forum for his unique blend of bleeding-heart liberalism and conservative Christian morality. Larson has developed an entertaining love-hate relationship with the ever-Satanic Boyd Rice, inviting Rice over for dinner in between their legendary on-air battles.
A rock musician back in the mid-’60s (check out his band the Dirty Shames’ track “I Don’t Care” on the Pebbles CD, Volume 8), by the decade’s end he became known as one of rock’s most vociferous opponents, even going so far as to punctuate his high school assembly anti-rock rants with some righteous solo guitar jams, with a tone grungy enough to wake Kurt Cobain, accompanied only by his blow-dried Bobby Sherman comb-over and enormous sideburns. Now that Satan’s involvement with rock music has become old hat since you can’t play CDs backwards, Larson has transferred his alarmist mania to an even easier target—the wacky world of cults. His new Book of Cults contains everything a “Bible-believing” Christian needs to know about over 100 different cults, from Mormonism to Manson, with each deviation from his own fundamentalist beliefs meticulously itemized.
There’s a whole section devoted to “common cult teachings,” explaining such un-Christian concepts as enlightenment, meditation and reincarnation; a chapter on “cultic origins” of Christianity’s major competitors in the world dogma market; and an “encyclopedia of cults,” including such obscurities as the Foundation Faith of the Millennium (the religion formerly known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment), the Asatru Free Assembly, the Holy Order of MANS, Silva Mind Control, the Findhorn Foundation (allegedly a bunch of New Age elf worshipers), the “Love Family” a.k.a. the Church of Armageddon, and Swedenborgianism. Also catalogued are the bulk of the cult-leader A list like Tony Alamo, Da Free John, Rev. Ike, Sai Baba and Elizabeth Clare Prophet; old favorites like the Children of God, the Aetherius Society, Crowelyianity, the Snake Handlers, est, Freemasonry and the “New Age Cults” (all in one handy entry), and some groups that aren’t exactly cults but what the heck, like UFOs, martial arts, astrology, trance channeling and, of course the Ku Klux Klan. There are a few glaring omissions, like Satanism, for instance, and more understandably, Heaven’s Gate (HIM). Still, if you can ignore some of the more offensive bits of Jay-sus propaganda (like his convoluted explanation of why enlightenment is bad), the new Book of Cults is an entertaining read, and thanks to Larson’s latent Luciferian tendencies, it contains a lot more well-researched, factual information than your average Christian “reference” work. DB

Publisher: Tyndale
Paperback: 499 pages